Quite true. Well aside from the issue of making items to improve the value of Noble rooms, like high-value chests, armor stands, statues, and the like. But really valuable trade goods serve no game purpose. Toady puts together systems without any regard for in-game goals.
This is why, once players get over the hump of learning how to survive the early years, they start creating forts with weird restrictions. Like the guys creating golden pyramids. I think if you don’t get a kick out of playing with your own goals and own restrictions, you’ll burn out on Dwarf Fortress early.
Not entirely true. Goblins prove a very serious threat to new players who don’t understand the importance of setting up traps. Further, the waves get strong enough that they will overwhelm a conventional trap setup. In my experience, I had to set up a macro trap, i.e. a bridge over a chasm, to get complete invulnerability to goblins.
I really don’t think the strength of the goblin waves is a problem, though the endless crap leave behind when they die is a bit of an issue. Still, there are ways of disposing of it, just like there are ways of getting rid of all the excess junk stone.
Like much of Dwarf Fortress, there’s no significant in-game reward for doing interesting things with cooking. If you’re going to do it, you do it because you want to do it. I spent a lot of time fiddling with trying to force my cooks to make varied dishes, use flour, etc. No in-game reason, but it was diverting to set my own goals in this area.
This isn’t a game design issue like the others, it’s programming problem, and a thorny one. All AI programmers run into it sooner or later. The issue is that pathfinding is an expensive process, so it’s common to take a shortcut to deciding distance when choosing targets.
It happens that due to the nature of Dwarf Fortress tasks, Toady could write a specific pathfinder for finding the closest object in terms of path distance, and it wouldn’t be expensive in terms of computation time. But I’ve seen a lot of problems where you’d have to execute N path searches or N^2 path searches instead of 1, and that’s very slow.
Yeah, that’s Toady. He just likes to build systems whether they have any point or not. There’s a ton of stuff in Dwarf Fortress that I wish had a use, like all those exotic alloys. Billon, bismuth bronze, black bronze, fine pewter, lay pewter, trifle pewter, sterling silver, rose gold - you’ll never make any of those unless you’ve set some sort of personal goal. 99% of the time if you want something valuable, you just go with the best precious metal you have available (silver, gold, or platinum). If you want something practical, you make steel or adamantium. Copper and even bronze are a joke, since the ingredients for steel are usually readily available.
Every once in a while, I look at Dwarf Fortress and say “all these systems could make a really cool game if a real game designer took a stab at it.”
